Family sociology as a theoretical enterprise? A personal reflection

Abstract

David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections, took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the doing of ‘practices’. Yet his 1996 text also identified key theoretical themes he considered important for family sociology to retain. I trace some of the theoretical concerns that he carried forward in his later work, while drawing attention to some aspects that invite further development, including the significance of everyday family meanings, the challenge of considering ‘family practices’ beyond affluent Minority worlds, and the need to critique the ‘individual’ along with the ‘family’. I offer this discussion on the basis that family sociology is a central issue for sociology in general as a theoretical enterprise.

The Aftermath of Death in the Continuing Lives of the Living: Extending ‘Bereavement’ Paradigms through Family and Relational Perspectives

“…Such questions and possibilities – even while primarily drawn from, and limited to, a family sociology rooted in affluent Minority World contexts (Ribbens McCarthy, 2022) – have the potential for new understandings of personhood and how ‘family’ and ‘family’ relationships feature in people’s imaginations and everyday relational lives and practices after the death of a significant other, alongside attention to the social patterns and structures of inequality of power and resources that are interwoven with death and its continuing aftermath. Further key questions remain to be considered concerning how the continuing aftermath of death in the lives of the living may be theorised, and how it may be experienced, in the full diversity of radical human and post-human relationality, inevitably embroiled with historic and contemporary issues of global power and inequality.…”

“…A key baseline involves vigorous critiques of the term ‘family’ itself, which have developed since the 1980s (reviewed by Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2019), questioning whether it should be used as a sociological term at all. Morgan (1996, 2003, 2011) notably suggests that ‘family’ might be more useful as an adjective or potentially a verb, rather than a noun indicating a categorical object, and his introduction of the term ‘family practices’ has been extensively taken up (Almack, 2022; Ribbens McCarthy, 2022).…”

“…Over recent decades family sociology has flourished, addressing distinctly sociological questions and analyses of families and relationships (Ribbens McCarthy, 2022). Yet, the significance of death as a ‘family’ event (Morgan, 1985) continues to be neglected.…”